David Hoskins | As a result of this criminal negligence, twelve working class martyrs joined the ranks of their 100,000 coalmining brothers and sisters who have been killed since 1900.
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Ruth Vela and Heather Cottin | The reactionary Minutemen group had called for Jan. 7 “Stop the Invasion” actions against immigrant workers in 19 states. But they brought out far more opponents than supporters.
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When the spring semester at New York University begins on January 17, striking graduate student workers will be back on the picket line. The fall semester ended with a series of large demonstrations by Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) members and their allies, who want the university to recognize their union, GSOC Local 2110, and NYU President John Sexton threatening the loss of stipends and work assignments for all striking grad students.
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C.R. LEOPOLD | Schroeder's ardently warm relationship with an increasingly authoritarian Putin also raises questions. If real power lies in controlling the sources of European energy, then Schroeder is now positioned to assist Putin in his plans to regain Russian regional dominance.
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Hb | A private developer’s plans to develop a water park on Randall’s Island jumped a hurdle yesterday after the city’s Franchise and Concession Review Committee voted to let the project move forward. This boondoggle of a project would further alienate precious greenspace.

For web surfers, comment has begun to bubble up from the bloggers. “I bow to few in my admiration for water parks. The flues and slides and wave machines and spurious soaking devices are part of what makes America great,” writes Gringcorp. But the Brooklyn scribe thinks this project, now slated to cover 26 acres, doesn’t have enough room to become a top-notch water park. “Raging Waters covers 50 acres, and that’s pretty cozy,” he says. “Building a state-of-the-art water park on that kind of space is simply not possible, especially if the Randall’s Island park’s 25 acres includes a seven-acre beach. Crazy slide space will be at a premium.”
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A.K. GUPTA | It seems like utter insanity: cutting food and raising energy prices on a battered and destitute population, which will now see precious earnings slip away to powerful banks while the U.S. occupation closes up shop on reconstruction. Yet it’s standard operating procedure for the IMF.
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JIM SHULTZ | But what does the election of Morales to the presidency here really mean? First and foremost it means that the Bolivian people, across class lines and regions, are demanding a reversal of twenty years of market-crazed economic policies pressed on the country from abroad, and by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in particular.
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ANTRIM CASKEY | Coal mining in Appalachia is not just killing people in accidents like Sago. The coal industry, aided and abetted by the Bush administration, is also steamrolling over any potential impediment on its path of greed.
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LAUREL SUTHERLIN | There lives a real possibility that New Orleans will become a proving ground where social justice and sustainability can merge into a model of major relevance to us all. People are being pulled here from all over the country, and within the seething chaos of it all is an electrified sense that something big is birthing here – a movement congealing from disparate directions – an invention of necessity that is addressing issues rapidly becoming universal.
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BENNETT BAUMER | At the end of the semester, GSOC members changed tactics and cut back picket lines to focus on leafletting and picketing NYU events. On Dec. 19, striking graduate students handed out fliers and temporarily disrupted NYU President John Sexton’s address by unfurling a banner at a NYU town hall meeting.
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A.K. GUPTA | After the strike ended on Dec. 22, the scuttlebutt was that TWU President Roger Toussaint had sold out the workers. But when Toussaint announced a deal on Dec. 27, many gasped in surprise that not only had the union beaten back the MTA’s demand to raise the retirement age from 55 to 62, the TWU also got as much as $200 million in pension overpayments returned to workers. more...3 Comments

NICHOLAS POWERS | And ugly it was. The subway strike of 2005 can be summed up by a phrase: “Black workers are Evil Doers.” When the Transit Workers Union 100, a majority Caribbean, Latino, Asian- and African-American local, walked off the job, the corporate elite began to attack. The first target was the minds of working-class New York, and the first battle to be fought was to keep them from identifying with TWU strikers and imitating them. The media immediately fused images of criminals, terrorists and spoiled children to the picketing workers.
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STEWART A. ALEXANDER | The U.S. economy is being sold to the highest bidders in world trade markets and our trade deficit is destroying our economy. A 69 billion dollar trade deficit, and over 700 billion annually, is putting millions of Americans in jeopardy of losing their homes, their jobs and everything they possess only to benefit big business.
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Heide Knake-Werner | The predicted employment effects of the neoliberal strategy do not go beyond expanding low-wage sectors and under employment. The unemployed are forced into precarious working conditions.. Answering the employment questionis the most important and most difficult challenge of an alternative socialist economy.
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Rainer Balcerowiak | Possible counter-measures against structural mass unemployment and an army of marginalized working poor are well-known: publoic investment programs, a legal minimum wage and redistribution of labor through reducefd working hours would be first steps in this direction.
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posted by keeley | The U.S.-Bahrain FTA is the first free trade agreement with a Persian Gulf country. Upon taking effect, the FTA will provide immediate duty-free access to one hundred percent of consumer and industrial products.
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Robert Kurz | Instead of overcapacities and selling houses to each other, Americans are called to radical economic change andsustainability. The economy should serve humanity and the state should be more than a trough for the superrich. "The notorious jobless growth faces a test when the ripe real estate bubble simultaneously bursts that up to now fed an irregular economic consumption.. The cheap services could not balance the melting off of industrial surplus value production."
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Tomer Malchi | On January 8, 2006 Workers and community groups all over Long Island and New York joined a solidarity picket to support striking East Buffet workers. The 318 Restaurant Workers Union and its East Buffet members have been on strike for four months to stop management's illegal and unfair labor practices.

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